Day 240 - 24 Apr 96 - Page 18
1 Agriculture operated, it was impossible for end users of
2 the meat products to be clear what the countries of origin
3 are.
4
5 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I understand that is what you said but,
6 anyway, you say that paragraph -- you are suggesting it is
7 some evidence that McDonald's must have had it, are you,
8 that the competitor says they all must have done. Is that
9 your point or is there more to it?
10 A. I think the point is two-fold your Honour: First, that
11 the memo briefly but accurately summarises the main points
12 of our discussion and, secondly -- and this was not
13 information that I supplied to McDonald's -- that people
14 working in McDonald's, including Annette Allen, are aware
15 that two of their competitors have said that they use that
16 South American beef and that the implication and they say
17 that "any other hamburger chain denying using such meat is
18 lying because of the way that the labelling system
19 operates". That was two related points that I wanted to
20 make.
21
22 A third is ----
23
24 Q. She is not accepting that that is true, is she, or are you
25 suggesting that she is? That is why I ask?
26 A. I did not provide her with that information.
27
28 Q. No.
29 A. And we subsequently became aware that these public
30 statements had been made by Burger King and Jack-in-the-box
31 in the United States.
32
33 Q. Yes. Thank you.
34 A. In the last paragraph of that first page, Annette Allen
35 accurately summarises the dialogue that we had, the
36 conversations that we had, where our point of discussion
37 with McDonald's was not that they were necessarily
38 deliberately trying to fool people about the origins of all
39 their beef supplies, but that simply, because of the way
40 that the import trade and certification process worked,
41 they had no way of knowing where the beef that they used
42 originated from, and that we were quite prepared to accept
43 that they were inadvertently using beef from recently
44 cleared tropical forest lands.
45
46 Then on the final page, in the second paragraph on that
47 page, Annette Allen appears to me to be encouraging
48 continued dialogue between ourselves at Friends of the
49 Earth and McDonald's to clear up the matter ----
50
51 MR. MORRIS: This is on page 2, is it?
52 A. This is on page 2, the second paragraph, to clear up
53 these confusions so that McDonald's could, and I quote,
54 "introduce a policy of buying only US beef (if the beef
55 was stamped with the country or origin)" and we were
56 hopeful at that stage at the time of our meeting that
57 ourselves, as a respected public interest pressure group,
58 and McDonald's would be able to work together to improve
59 the way the beef trade operated and, as Annette Allen goes
60 on to say on that same page, apparently responding
